March 19, 2008

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Harvard University Press has just issued a book promulgating a JFK
assassination conspiracy theory.
Intellectual Affairs

Let’s put that sentence on the chalkboard and underscore the
anthropologically interesting aspects of the situation, shall we?
Harvard University Press has just issued a book promulgating a JFK
assassination conspiracy theory.

Within the continuum of any given culture, there is what the
structuralists used to call the combinatoire – the underlying grid of
distinctions and exclusions, an implicit directory of what goes with
what (and, just as important, what doesn’t). So the appearance of The
Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David Kaiser
counts, arguably, as something more than a piece of publishing news.
That, too. But we may be talking here about something like a mutation
in the cultural genome.

That said, the book’s argument does not exactly qualify as a paradigm
shift.

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Full review here:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/19/mclemee

And an excerpt of Fetzer's response to McLemee's review:

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It might have been a good idea for the author to have taken Vincent
Bugliosi’s observation that Assassination Science (1998), Murder in
Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003) are the
only exclusively scientific books published on the death of JFK. These
books bring together experts on different aspects of the case (eleven,
nine, and six, respectively). Their research provides objective
scientific evidence of a well-executed conspiracy and a meticulously
planned cover-up. The author of this book, who assumes that Oswald was
the lone assassin, appears to be unfamiliar with the most important
research on the most basic evidence.

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See Fetzer's full comment at URL above.

Peter Fokes